


Law of Contagion

by Anonymous



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hand-wavey Science, Mind Control, Mindfuck, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-06-08 10:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6850819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jessica is immune to Kilgrave - until the exact moment he dies. Then the virus rushes in on her, not using her as a victim but as a host.<br/>Now Jessica can control people and it's a nightmare. "</p><p>Spoilers for all of Jessica Jones S01, but canon-divergent for The Defenders.   Saw this prompt on the Jessica Jones section of the daredevilkink meme and couldn't stop thinking about it. Not sure if I'll write more, but this is how it begins...</p><p>[Edited to add a link to the original prompt: http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/6602.html?thread=11510986]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_"If you let it, life will push you over the line, until you're the villain. Problem is, you don't always know that you've crossed that line."_

 

Jessica listens to Malcolm take down information about three messages before she is suddenly too exhausted to listen to one more _second_ of misery. 

He cocks his head at her quizzically when she stands up. “Going to bed,” she whispers and, when he muffles the phone against his chest to ask her a question, she holds up a silencing hand:  “Just leave the phone and lock up when you go.” She takes the bottle with her, but leaves the coffee mug. It doesn't hold enough liquor anyway. 

She’s kicked off her boots before she’s even out of the office, then peels off her jeans and leaves them on the bedroom floor.   She manages to get the whiskey onto the nightstand before flopping onto the bed.  Malcolm’s voice continues at intervals and then stops. Jessica half-expects him to come check on her before he leaves, but—no, that’s the front door, opening and closing.  She listens to the quiet. There is no one else in her apartment.  There is no one else in her bed.  There is no one else in her skull. 

There had been a moment of complete and perfect silence, after the vicious crack of Kilgrave’s spine, after his body had thumped down onto the dock at the Hudson Ferry Terminal.  Jessica had recognized it instantly: the pure silence that comes from being alone inside your own head, with no one else’s needs or desires or opinions clamoring for attention.  Just a moment of blissful emptiness before she became aware of Trish, trembling ten feet away, and the two dozen ferry passengers milling around, bleeding and confused. 

“C’mere,” Jessica had said, beckoning Trish into a hug, gruff only because she was shit at being soothing and reassuring.  The only comfort she can manage is the kind that comes out of a bottle.  Trish should know that by now, but she stumbles over anyway, shaking so hard that Jessica can feel it when she puts her arms around Trish's shoulders.  “He’s gone,” Jessica whispers.  “Everything is going to be all right, okay?”

“I, I kissed—oh, God, Jessica, he…I—”

“Shhh,”  Jessica smooths Trish’s hair back from her forehead.  “Repeat after me: everything is going to be all right.”

“Everything is going to be all right,” Trish says, but she doesn’t sound convinced.  She sounds like she’s going into shock.

Jessica fumbles in her pocket, but her phone is dead.  Of _course_ it is!   

“Uhhh, ‘scuse me?” 

Jessica turns.  It’s one of the ferry passengers Kilgrave mind-controlled into brawling: a middle-aged guy whom Jessica pegs as an unsuccessful day-trader, hedge-fund manager, something like that.  He’s got visible scratches on his left cheek and blood—not from the scratches, from another person—on the front of his white dress shirt. Somehow, he's decided Jessica is in charge here.

“Give me your phone,” Jessica holds out her free hand, snaps impatiently until the guy meekly surrenders a new-model iPhone, happy to hand off responsibility to anyone else. 

Jessica’s first call is to 911.  The dispatcher hasn’t even gotten through asking for the nature of the emergency when Jessica cuts him off; “Someone’s been killed,” she announces to get his attention.  “You should send your nearest patrol and,” she tries to estimate how many passengers and ferry staff are wandering around like shell-shocked zombies.  “Ambulances.  Send a lot of ambulances.”

Her second call is to Jeri Hogarth.  “It’s done.  Kilgrave’s dead.  I killed him and you’re going to be my lawyer.”  She is _really_ not in the mood to figure out whose turn it is to collect on a favor, so fortunately, all Jeri says is, “I’ll meet you at central booking.  Refer all questions to me. Do not say a word to anyone.”

That had been easy: Jessica doesn’t feel much like talking at the best of times, and she really doesn't feel like chatting tonight.  She’d returned the phone and led Trish to a bench, close enough to keep an eye on the other passengers, but far enough away that they hadn’t had to stare at Kilgrave’s lifeless body.  They had listened to the police sirens grow nearer. 

Trish, bless her, had protested when the cops had pulled out the handcuffs, but Jessica told her not to:   “Don’t, Trish—I’ve already called Jeri, she’ll meet me.”

Jessica turns in bed, annoyed by the tangle of sheets, unable to find a comfortable place on the pillow.  As promised, Jeri had been waiting; she’d neatly dispatched all the DA’s argument for custody and arranged for Jessica to be released on her own recognizance until trial.

“My client allegedly killed someone who had created a state of mass hysteria—and I _will_ fill the first three rows of the court with witnesses to that effect,” Jeri Hogarth had assured the DA. “So either she was miraculously immune and acting to save her fellow New Yorkers,” Jeri makes Jessica sound like a saint, “or she was not in control of her faculties and acting on the wishes of this dangerous and suicidal man. Take your pick.” Jeri had concluded her summation by closing her legal pad: discussion over.  “Either way, Ms. Jones is still a life-long New Yorker, a business owner who rents in MidTown West.  She has no family; all her ties are here in the city.  Not a threat to society, Ms. Reyes, and no flight-risk.”

The DA had threatened to freeze Jessica’s assets and Jessica had snorted.  A couple thousand dollars in a checking account?  “You’re welcome to it, lady, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

In the end, she’d been sent back to retrieve her personal effects at the property desk and told not to leave the city without informing the local precinct.

Jessica’s personal effects—keys, her phone, a bank card, four Alias Investigations business cards, and two bent sticks of gum—had barely filled a pathetic corner of a scarred plastic bin. The phone battery was still dead.

“Hey,”  Jessica had banged on the property desk, “don’t I get a phone call?”  She probably wasn’t entitled to a call, since she hadn’t been remanded into custody, but she must have looked persuasive, tired and annoyed and with her lawyer standing right next to her.  The sergeant there had shrugged and handed over the receiver.   She’d called Trish; it wasn’t until she’d walked back out of the precinct and saw her best friend waiting in the parking lot that Jessica had allowed herself to believe it was all over. 

At least until she’d gotten back to her office, plugged her phone into charger, and started receiving literal calls for help from every corner of Hell’s Kitchen.

Jessica rolls over and pulls a pillow over her head, like that could shield her.  She listens to the old building creak and settle.  Somewhere, a car door slams.  An air current wafts through the apartment from the broken front door; the bathroom door creaks. The air on her exposed hand makes her think of Kilgrave’s breath, hot and human as she’d dug her fingers into his jaw.  That breathing had grown thinner as she’d dragged his feet off the dock, stopped completely when she’d wrenched his head around. 

Jessica sits up suddenly, hurls the pillow across the room, hearing a muffled puff as it explodes in the corner.  She’s _not_ feeling sorry for Kilgrave.  Not _ever_. She’s sorry for Reva, for Ruben.  She’s sorry for getting Trish involved, and Malcolm, and that nurse from Metro General.  She's even sorry for Robin, crazy as she is. Yes, it’s true that once upon a time there was a scared, sick little boy named Kevin... Jessica might have felt sorry for him, but that boy was gone long before she had anything to do with it.  Just as Kilgrave is gone now. 

Except, of course, Kevin had _become_ Kilgrave.  What had Kilgrave become?

“Nothing,” Jessica tells her dark apartment.  When people died—Reva, Ruben, her parents, her brother—they stopped interacting with the real, physical world.  Maybe they were still remembered, still loved, but they didn’t exist as tangible beings anymore.  They had no...what would her shrink have said?  The dead have no agency in the world. Why should Kilgrave be any different?

The answer sneaks in, so subtle and insidious that Jessica could almost believe Kilgrave had planted it in her mind himself: _because of his powers._ Those powers had enabled him to live as he wished; would he suddenly start playing by the rules now that he's dead? Could those powers simply be extinguished?  It’s not as though mind control had always been an integral part of Kilg—Kevin?  Whoever.  The power to control the minds and intentions of others had been a freakish side-effect of a medical treatment that he had absorbed and transmitted like an airborne virus.  A virus might not kill its host, but if that host were killed?

Jessica flops back into bed, kicks aside the blanket irritably.  She’ll ask Trish in the morning.  Surely there’s been someone talking about curing the common cold on Trish Talk?  Hadn’t there been a whole episode inviting people to call in and sponsor flu vaccines for low-income senior citizens?  Trish would know, or would know someone who knew.  Did a virus die if something _else_ killed its host?  Namely, one Jessica Jones.  Or did the virus somehow…escape?  Live to fight another day in a new, stronger host?

Jessica scrubs her hands against the sheet to get rid of the skin-crawling feel of Kilgrave’s breath.  She is _never_ going to get to sleep like this.  But at the same time, she’s too stubborn to give up, turn on the lights and…what?  Call Trish?  Read a book?    No.  No, she’s going to sleep.  She arranges the blanket and her remaining pillow, lays down.  Stares up at the ceiling.  She tries to count sheep, but she doesn’t think she’s ever seen a real live sheep.  Maybe at that petting zoo in Brooklyn?

Patsy’s mother—sometimes, Jessica forgets to think of her as Trish’s mother—was always telling Jessica she should count her blessings.  So Jessica does:  Trish, Luke, Malcolm, that nurse from MetroGeneral, even Jeri Hogarth.  Especially Jeri Hogarth, after her performance at the precinct today.  To be honest, she’d been a little surprised that Jeri had taken her case.  Jessica had already guilted her into taking on more of Kilgrave’s victims, pro bono.  “Doing something good helps with the self-loathing,”  she’d told the lawyer, speaking from experience.  But Jeri wasn’t the type to feel guilt or shame for very long.  She knew what it was like to be possessed by Kilgrave, but that didn’t mean she felt sympathy with his other victims. Well, Jessica was grateful for whatever sense of shame or obligation or, yes, even self-loathing had persuaded Jeri to take her on as a client.  Not that Jeri had much opportunity to refuse; Jessica hadn’t exactly _asked_ her, she’d just called and demanded—

The possibility is so revolting, so pernicious, that Jessica is gagging even before she throws herself out of bed.  The alcohol burns as badly coming up as it did going down.  No.  No, no, no.  She stumbles to her feet, trips over her jeans, flees the bedroom like she can leave her thoughts behind. 

She finds herself in the front room of her office.  She needs to—she should…she doesn’t know what she should do.  Call the hospital?  That nurse…?  Or, no, the police.  If she’s somehow contracted Kilgrave’s powers, if the virus had leached into her, borne on his dying breath, then she should definitely, definitely…what?  She remembers the last time she’d tried to persuade the police to lock her up. 

Jessica realizes her hands are shaking, violent, seizure-like tremors coursing up her arms. She presses them against the nearest wall, pushes until she feels the plaster crack under her palms, until she feels her heart-rate slow to something approximating normal.  She’ll call Trish, just like she had when she’d needed a ride.  Trish has always brought her home safely.

Had Trish _wanted_ to pick her up from the police station?  The thought makes Jessica stop midway to her desk.  Had the man at the Ferry Terminal wanted to loan her his telephone?  Had the 911 dispatcher felt like sending four ambulances to the Hudson Ferry Terminal? Had the DA decided it wasn't worth it to freeze her measly assets?  Had that desk sergeant really wanted to allow her that telephone call?  She can’t ask them, but there is one person she can call. 

Her telephone is on the corner of her desk—right where she’d told Malcolm to leave it.  But that doesn’t mean anything, not necessarily.

It takes three minutes to find Jeri Hogarth’s number because Jessica is shaking again.  The lawyer picks up immediately.  Maybe she’s had a lot of experience with urgent late-night phone calls, or maybe she’s just not sleeping so well these days.

“Jeri?  It’s Jessica.”

“Yes?”  Carefully modulated, none of the annoyance you’d expect from a three AM phone call.  But, of course, Jeri is a professional and Jessica is still nominally her client.

“When I called you last night—I mean, yesterday, when I called you yesterday and said I needed a lawyer and you said you’d meet me at the precinct…did you want to?”

“Did I want to leave my imploding law practice to traipse down to Hell’s Kitchen to bail you out, again? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Did you…” Jessica’s _voice_ is shaking now.  She can hear it.  “Did you _choose_ to?” And then, when she hears the slight hesitation in Jeri’s breathing, she adds, “it’s all right, you can tell me. I want you to tell me the truth.”

She says it, but she already knows.  She knows because Jeri has never—not once in all their fractious years of working together—ever hesitated over anything just to spare Jessica’s feelings. Jessica reaches for the desk chair, but her flailing hand can’t quite grasp it and it rolls backwards.  She sinks to the floor, retching, but there’s nothing in her stomach.  Meanwhile, Jeri talks: “…it felt just the same, the same as when he was in my head.  I didn’t want to go—I was busy here and I’ve had enough of your cases, Jessica, I really have—but I couldn’t say no.  I meant to, but when I opened my mouth, the words that came out were the ones that agreed to meet you…”

“Shut up,”  Jessica whimpers. Then, louder: “Shut up, shut up!  Stop talking!”.

And, of course, Jeri does.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Was going to leave this as a one-shot, and then I started watching 'The Defenders'... Damn you, Marvel!

_"Knowing it's real means you gotta make a decision. One: keep denying it. Or two: do something about it."_.

 

“Main Street,” Jessica mutters, “Birch Street.  Higgins Drive…” She recites the neighborhood twice before she can bear to touch the phone to hang up on Jeri.  There are seven more calls before the sun rises the next morning.  Four are unknown numbers—reporters, maybe, or more desperate people who saw Jessica on the news.  The rest are Trish, who calls three times after 5:30.  Crouching between the desk and the wall, Jessica watches her phone light up silently, then go dim as each incoming call goes to voicemail: Malcolm had courteously turned off the ringer when he’d left the night before. 

She hadn’t specifically _told_ Malcolm to do that, which causes a spark of hope to shimmer for a moment before it dies.  Even at the height of his powers, Kilgrave hadn’t dictated her every move.  Just the important ones.  He’d erased the habits he considered distasteful (her drinking, her tendency to procrastinate, the way she automatically kicked her feet up on any desk or coffee table within reach of her long legs).  But he’d left others, ones that didn’t annoy him, ones he couldn’t be bothered correcting, ones that served his purposes.  He hadn’t specifically ordered her to breathe, although if he’d told her to stop, she would have. 

The longer she’d been under his control, the more pervasive it had become.   Jessica’s memories of that time get progressively hazier until the sudden, sharp shock of Reva’s death (murder—Reva had been _murdered_ ) snaps everything back into focus again.  Toward the end, Jessica recalls, she’d often found herself staring into space, simply _waiting_ for his command.  But she’s only had Kilgrave’s powers for…a little over six hours, according to the clock on her phone.  Not long enough to have settled that deeply into Malcolm’s psyche.  No: even strung out on drugs, he’d been remarkably considerate, for a junkie.  Doubtlessly he’d simply switched the phone to silent so she could sleep undisturbed, or maybe just out of habit.  After all, she hadn’t told him _not_ to.

Christ.  Jessica watches the sun struggle over the rooftops and gently eases her way out of the memories, a nauseating feeling, like gingerly tracing the bruise around a deep and ugly wound.  She wrenches open the bottom drawer of the desk, hears the hollow thump of the empty bottle hitting the back of the drawer.  Just as well.  She should keep her wits about her.  She could really use some…

“Coffee, Jessica?”

Jessica freezes, even though she knows Malcolm can’t see her from the front door. Had she somehow summoned him by thinking about him? Psychically demanded that he make her coffee and deliver it to her door? That is not how this thing works.  Or does it?  

“I made extra 'cause I don’t think you should use your stove or anything until we get the super to look at it,” Malcolm continues, his voice muffled by the remains of her front door. “Something hit it.  Uh, really hard?” 

Jessica’s mind scrolls through ridiculous excuses—tired? coming down with something?  washing my hair?—to keep him away.  Sharing his mind with Kilgrave had driven Malcolm to a vicious addiction from which he had barely escaped; he won’t survive a second exposure.

 “Uhm, Jessica? Hands kinda full here...oh, wait, no, I can...”

Malcolm must reach through the door’s broken panel because Jessica hears the lock click open.  He had, as commanded, locked the door last night. And Jessica realizes she no longer needs a polite excuse. 

“Malcolm!” she shouts, “Go away!”

The warped floorboards by the door creak as he hesitates on the threshold.  “Hey, okay, I get it.  Busy night, you’re probab—”

“Get.  The fuck.  Out.”

The lock clicks back into place.  “Uh.  So, that’s a no, then?  I’ll just.  Uhm.  Keep the coffee at my place, okay…?”

An hour later, it’s Trish at the door.  Her mother’s daughter, she’s just a little too polite to enter without an invitation, but she does call. Again.  Then sends a text.  Two texts:  the last one threatens to go to the police _“to take down the rest of this door if you don’t answer me!1!”_  

One of Jessica’s favorite things about Trish is the fact that she _never_ makes idle threats.  Another is that Trish has a way of inspiring her best ideas.

All morning, Jessica has been mentally cataloguing the times Kilgrave had controlled someone’s mind.  Going back over all the memories she’s tried so hard to drink away.  Reading Trish’s text again makes her notice a pattern so obvious, she'd overlooked it: with Kilgrave, the words had to be _spoken_.  How many victims had Jessica interviewed, and almost all of them had mentioned his accent? When he’d texted commands, his words hadn’t created the mindless _oh-what-a-good-idea_ compulsion of his spoken words.  This virus (or…whatever) works via sound waves: Kilgrave had to speak to you to get you to do what he wanted. He was most persuasive when he can look into your eyes, secure your attention.  It helped if listeners were in his presence, but he’d once controlled a whole hospital using the public-address system.  Jessica had pried the truth out of Jeri over the telephone.  But something about _reading_ words, even Kilgrave’s, had made them less his idea and more her own.  No, to get her to follow his written commands, Kilgrave had to blackmailed her into compliance.  In fact, Jessica had even had to set an alarm to remind herself to respond to his texts.  So Jessica doesn't dare call Trish, but she can pick up her phone and type a response. 

It is three words long and only includes one verb, but she proof-reads it twice to make sure it doesn’t inadvertently command Trish to do anything.  Just in case. “Meeting with Jeri,” she types, and since she doesn’t specify _when_ , it’s not a lie.

Trish responds immediately: “RU OK? Call me when done!”

Which sounds enough like Trish that Jessica figures she hasn’t done too much harm.  Yet. Her next message is to the father-and-son handyman team who had fixed her door last time.   She digs around in her desk drawer until she finds their business card, stapled to the extortionate receipt.  

Jessica balances the flimsy carbon receipt on her fingertips.  She could call this number, and get Handyman and Son over here to fix her door, regardless of anyone else on their schedule.  For free. Within the hour. All she has to do is say the word.

It’s tempting, especially when she thinks about the meager savings account that the ADA had wanted to impound last night.  After all, she’s already paid to have the damn door fixed once.  _She’_ s not the one who broke it again.  And they are professional door-fixers: it’s not like she’s asking them to cure cancer.  In fact, if they’d fixed the door properly the first time…

And this is how it happens, Jessica realizes:  this is how you talk yourself into believing that the world owes you, that you’re entitled to take what you want, that wants are _needs_ the rest of the world exists to fulfill.

She puts the receipt down gingerly, smooths it against the scarred laminate of her desk. Stares at it. The son has evidently tried to bring the business into the 21st century: below the telephone number is a yahoo.com email address.  _Main Street, Birch Street, Higgins Drive, Cobalt Drive…_ she fires up her laptop and shoots off an email, offers to pay twice their going rate if they can fix the door today.  “ _I’ll supply materials_ ,” she types, thinking of a sheet of linoleum peeling off the floor of her wrecked kitchen.  Eyeballing it, she figures it will roughly cover the window.  She’s twice tried glass; third time’s lucky.

Jessica wrestles the linoleum off the floor, then props it up outside the door and retreats before Malcolm sees her.  Back in her apartment, she is suddenly assailed by the memory of Hope Schlactmann’s father, the Mid-Western contractor who had been so insistent about trying to fix her door the first time.  The memory is so sharp that Jessica sinks to her knees, back against the door. It had totally been—what had Trish’s high-dollar shrink called it…displacement?  Bob Schlactmann had been displacing his anxiety about his daughter.  But he had been sincere, as well.  Sincere in his desire to protect her, a stranger, from an evil he couldn’t even imagine.

It had gotten him killed in the end, of course.  

Jessica runs her hands through her hair.  Doors work both ways.  Bob Schlactmann had been worried about keeping Jessica safe—a woman alone in New York, he'd said.  And Jessica still needs that door for protection.  For protecting everyone else from her.

She refreshes her email obsessively until she gets a response from the handyman.  The subject line reads “You Again!,” which doesn’t sound like something you’d type to the person controlling your brain, so maybe written messages are safe.  The realization makes her eyes water so hard that she has to wipe them with her shirtsleeve before she can even read the email.  She’s not _crying_ , it’s just the computer font is really small and she hasn’t slept and her eyes are tired.  Handyman and Son of Handyman write that they can stop by that afternoon, since they have another job in the area.  Is that OK?

 _YES, that’s fine!_   Jessica types.  _Come as soon as you can!_ Then she deletes the second sentence, just in case her writing-not-speaking theory turns out to be crap.

She retreats all the way to the kitchen when she hears them arrive.  She is not safe to be around, but at least she can text another excuse to Trish (who responds to " _getting door"_ fixed with " _again?! jesus, jess!")._ Jessica hears the two men talking to each other—not Spanish.  Portuguese?—and then the sound of hammering, and then more talking.  When they fall silent, she counts to ten and then peeks beyond the kitchen doorway.  The front door hangs straight now, its window blocked by the ragged side of the old linoleum.  Jessica creeps past her bedroom and slips the check under the door.  She is halfway back to the sanctuary of the kitchen when she hears the front door open behind her.

“My father says,” the younger handyman begins pedantically, “this material is not good for repairs.  He says...”

“Oh, get lost!”  Jessica snaps.

The younger man immediately takes his father by the hand, turns, and walks toward the elevator.  For a split-second, Jessica thinks she’s simply offended him (wouldn't be the first time...), but then she realizes their toolboxes are still in her doorway.  Her check sits on the floor.

 _Shit,_ Jessica thinks and barely stops herself from saying it.  Instead, she calls:“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know!” the son shouts back, without stopping.

“Wait—”

They stop so quickly that the old man stumbles.

“Just, just—forget I said anything.”  Jessica can hear the desperation in her own voice.  When the men turn to stare at her, they look mystified.

The older man says something: Jessica doesn’t understand the words, but she can tell it’s a question from the way his voice quirks at the end.

“I…don’t know where we are,” his son replies.

“Take the check,” Jessica says shortly.  “Go home.”  She considers adding _have a nice day_ or something like that, but she isn’t totally sure what that might compel them to do: blow off their afternoon appointments to go to Coney Island?  Stick up a bank to fund hookers and heroin?

She slams the door before they reach her end of the hallway, and this time she makes sure to lock it.  Crouching in the dark hallway, she hears them gather up their things. Footsteps.  The rattle of the elevator.  Finally, the not-quite silence of the old tenement on a Tuesday afternoon: distant traffic, a far-away television, Robyn stomping around upstairs.  “Main Street,” Jessica mutters, “Birch Street.  Higgins Drive…”

**Author's Note:**

> the ch 1 epigraph is from Jessica Jones S01E13; ch 2 epigraph is from S01E01


End file.
